Digital front doors' advantages when meeting population health needs

Healthcare IT News sat down with Keith Algozzine, CEO of UCM Digital Health, a vendor of digital front door technology, to get a handle on the aforementioned challenges; how digital front doors can help with population health; how digital front doors work behind the scenes to accomplish goals; and how digital front doors work with enhanced health benefits such as in-home care and treatment, virtual primary care, and therapeutics to empower a population to take control of their health for the better. Digital front doors can be effective in removing barriers while ensuring that patients get continuity of care specifically designed around their individual needs. Provider organizations often cannot reach the patients that would benefit the most from population health programs. Digital health and digital front doors can be an effective means of providing any patient with access to a medical or mental health care provider, removing barriers by allowing patients to connect via phone, chat, video or even asynchronously.

An effective data platform can facilitate data sharing and integration, providing providers and other organizations with full visibility of the patient's health information, including the ability to track population health program compliance and outcomes. For instance, platforms can have the ability to understand and translate different code sets across organizations so they can come to a common understanding of the patient's data and information, ultimately improving health outcomes. For instance, connecting a partner who delivers in-home labs, along with a telehealth provider and a brick-and-mortar primary care physician, to enable data sharing and collaboration with the patient's health, the appropriate level of care and best outcomes in mind as the objectives. They provide patients with access to enhanced benefits because they offer access to a range of patient services across a variety of care settings: virtual emergent and urgent care, virtual mental health care, virtual primary care, in-home care and more. Patients can initiate care digitally, get complete care virtually, or can continue it in-home, if and when needed. A digital presence clearly is the future of care, enabling providers to make meaningful connections with the patient and other organizations and engaging the patient in their health.